The 2011 release of OS X 10.7 Lion seemed to mark the natural endpoint of the “big cat” naming scheme. But Apple couldn’t resist the lure of the “cat, modifier cat” naming pattern, releasing OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion a year later. Perhaps it just wanted to give its cat nine lives.

The 10th major release, OS X 10.9 Mavericks, is named after an awkwardly plural California surfing spot, finally ending the feline dynasty. But what part of the operating system’s existence is this? The afterlife?

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When it comes to OS X, many people are suffering from the end-of-history illusion: the belief that while the Mac platform has consistently experienced significant enhancements in the past, it will somehow not continue to grow and mature in the future.

With Lion, the Mac entered an awkward adolescence, acquiring a newfound concern about what the other kids were doing. Accordingly, OS X’s last two releases included several naked attempts to ape the look and feel of its more successful sibling, iOS.

But that was all before last year’s ouster of Scott Forstall, senior vice president of iOS Software. By all accounts, Forstall was one of the driving forces behind the iOS aesthetic that Lion and Mountain Lion so enthusiastically embraced. Jony Ive's iOS 7 strikes off in a bold new direction based on a philosophy that Apple is eager to generalize to the company as a whole—leaving OS X holding the stitched-leather bag.

An OS out to sea

Let’s say we accept that this is not the end of history and that OS X will continue to evolve. To what end? Aside from undoing the most egregious peer-pressure-motivated interface changes, what should this first non-cat release of OS X do differently from its predecessors?

One option would be to continue to follow iOS’s lead, switching gears from rich textures and simulations of analogous physical products and setting off in pursuit of the new, spare iOS 7 aesthetic. I’ll spoil it for you: Apple hasn’t chosen this path—not yet, anyway. Time and resource constraints alone could explain this choice. After all, Apple didn’t even have the iPad version of iOS 7 ready in time for WWDC this year. An interface overhaul in Mavericks was clearly out of the question.

Mavericks is also not an internals-only release like Snow Leopard, which famously promised “no new features.” There are new features in Mavericks, even new bundled applications.

To some degree, the content of any OS release is determined by what did and didn’t make the deadline for the previous release. There are exceptions, like Fusion Drive, which didn’t quite make it into Mountain Lion but also couldn’t wait for the next major OS release because it was a prerequisite for some new hardware products.

Nevertheless, Apple does try to give each new OS some sort of theme. Mavericks is the first California-themed release of OS X, named after “places that inspire us here in California,” according to Craig Federighi, who says this naming scheme is intended to last for at least the next 10 years. The pressure is on for Mavericks to set a new direction for the Mac platform.

According to Apple, Mavericks has a dual focus. Its first and most important goal is to extend battery life and improve responsiveness. Secondarily, Mavericks aims to add functionality that will appeal to “power users” (Apple’s words), a group that may be feeling neglected after enduring two releases of OS X playing iOS dress-up.

Is that enough for Mavericks to live up to its major-release version number and to kick off the next phase of OS X’s life? Let’s find out.

I am quite surprised by this and perhaps it's becaiuse of the writer (I don't own an iOS but the 24 pages is something I can't just skim over to see new updates). But I really wish the other writers that cover OS udpates were this in-depth. I believe the Windows 8.1 was 4 pages and 8 itself was like 6?

Just to get another opinion in here... As a Mac developer I've been using 10.9 as my primary OS for months now (with 10.8 a short reboot away if I need it, which surprisingly I hardly ever did) and it's absolutely worth upgrading.

There don't seem to be any downsides that I can think of, and a lot of upsides. My favourite being the way multiple displays are handled.

i've been happily using mavericks ever since the gm was seeded to devs. but then again, you won't notice many difference until you look closely. the only thing i've been missing is how coloring files worked in previous versions: there used to be a background color for the file name, with "tags" it's only a tiny colored dot

I'm definitely going to read this whole thing, and I'm confident that I'll enjoy learning about the new features... but heck if I'm going to wait until I'm done reading, to install the thing! It's going directly on my mini tonight, and it'll probably hit the iMac sometime this weekend.

For what it's worth, it isn't an awkward plural, it's an awkward possessive. Maverick was a dog. It was his beach. The apostrophe got lost.That said, time for popcorn and good reading. Love, LOVE the Siracusa deep dive!

So I did a cursory skim and see that memory compression is now in use.

But as a practical matter, can anyone who has been using 10.9 comment on how it'd fare with the 4GB limitation of the old hardware that still meets the system requirements? It is it good/bad/horrible experience for general usage?

John Siracusa / John Siracusa has a B.S. in Computer Engineering from Boston University. He has been a Mac user since 1984, a Unix geek since 1993, and is a professional web developer and freelance technology writer.